The Lonely People
by Reine-de-Coeurs
Summary: An exploration of character and loneliness.


**Credit obviously to Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. **

**The italicised verses in quotes belong to The Beatles ('Eleanor Rigby'); credit to them as well. **

**Part I **

'_Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been, lives in a dream, waits at the window wearing a face that she keeps in a jar by the door. Who is it for?' _

Eleanor Lovett, who can count on one hand the times any-one's ever called her 'Eleanor,' chances a half bit of a gaze across the room. It's a bit silly, she supposes it is, the way that all the time now, she daren't look about her in her own house. She gazes the afternoon away, ripping her glances back to her fingernails when he shifts from foot to foot. She can't (she just can't) let him see even one of her glances, for she'd not have a word to explain herself with.

She knows she needn't worry, any-how; he isn't looking. He's never looking, not even when he's got one hand sheathing her waist and the other lacing her neck. She feels as though she's on her knees before him all the time, even when his rage makes him shiver into her shoulders. She soothes him, assures him; she bids him her counsel in a gentle hush, and she gets to feeling lonely all over again.

Dear beautiful Mr Todd is on fire again. He's never not on fire, really. She can feel the heat pouring off him like an open furnace, so she takes a few steps across the floorboards nearer him. She bites her lip and presses her fingernails to her palm. If she stands ever so still in the middle of the floor, she can feel the waves of bitter rage that shake him, tremor by tremor.

She always did have an odd sense for him, more than the simple fondness she spoke about. Even in the old days, when they were young, when he was not shattered. When he would walk round the up-stairs, she was warm and cheery. When he would pace round it, she was sick, hands trembling and un-useful. She never knew why, and he never knew at all.

That time's gone out with a sputter and a fade, though, now, and he's got an awful fever what needs breaking. She worries some-times that she won't be able to, much as she might have learnt herself how to soothe it for half a minute. She shakes her head to herself, sharp; she can't imagine any-one's ever got any-where thinking like that. She means to save him; that's what she'll do.

She wraps her arms up round his hardened shoulders, her fingers soft where she presses. He jerks a few times, and then collapses in her touches like he always does, his breath a harsh gasp. She tilts her chin on his neck and listens to his jagged sighs. 'Wait,' she whispers to him, words brushing against his ear.

**Part II**

'_Father McKenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear; no one comes near. Look at him working, darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there. What does he care?'_

Sweeney Todd, who, for well over most of his life, was known to the world by a different name entirely (a different name, a different heart, he some-times even thinks by different eyes), is not the sort of man one likely addresses by his proper name. He named himself; the very idea came to him one night, sitting in the dark of his guiltless cell. Think was all he did some nights; most nights. He would have read, he thought often, if there were any-one to send him a friendly book or a pamphlet.

He asked for paper once a week to write to his dear wife, who stopped her replies after two months. He recalls how many nights he spent in wondering at that, and a bitter laugh rises to his lips.

Lucy, wonderful innocuous Lucy, had insisted to him upon being no one other than 'Miss Carpenter' until the morning they'd woken up married. He hadn't thought much of it at the time, but now, lying cold at night in the same bed where she used to sleep beside him, he could say it does him comfort. It means that perhaps, _perhaps_, she was of the same sort he is now. He puts his head in his hand and draws out a jagged breath. It pains him to think of her so, but it makes him almost believe her beside him, so he does so on occasion.

When they'd spent their first morning married, he'd bid her call him 'Ben,' and, if he recalled, she'd politely declined, wrapped up in the sheets with such a prim expression on her face. 'Benjamin, then, at least?' he'd asked her, playful and naïve as always.

'Very well,' she'd replied to him softly, after a moment's silence. 'Benjamin,' she'd said, and for a moment he'd thought he saw her shoulders stiffen. He'd brushed it off, of course. He must have been imagining it, must have been filled with nerves. He knew, he knows still, how Lucy had adored him; she'd told him so, often, when he'd asked.

Even the woman down-stairs, his neighbour Mrs Lovett, does not dare utter his first name, for all the sharp, love-lorn gazes he lets her keep the impression he doesn't see. No; from her, a simple 'Love' when they're in her shop, a sentimental 'Mr T …' when they're in his, a breath-taken 'Mr Todd!' when they're in bed together (bed, or any-where else he chooses).

He does not utter her first name, either; he's no longer certain what it is. He will admit, but only to himself, that he wonders some-times what her name is. Benjamin might have known, but Benjamin is dead and Sweeney is too proud to ask.

_Strange woman_, he muses. The second morning back to London, he sat in his shop with the beautiful, taunting picture on the wall, lonely sentiments gripping him by the sides of the head and shaking him to within an inch of his mind. Strange that she'd come up just then; strange that she'd known what to do with him. With her consoling words and her lips brushing his collar-bone, it had been she who'd begun it. He, cloaked in rage and loneliness, had been in desperate need of some-one to hold on to, and soothing, practical Mrs Lovett had offered him herself for just precisely that purpose.

On their first conversation (or, rather, the first time she'd spoken copious words about nothing while he'd nodded every so often), she had inquired as to whether he might pity a woman alone. He was, in turn, a man alone, and acquiesced without even realising it.

When-ever he feels particularly stricken with loneliness or rage (or any-thing at all, come to that), he calls her up the stairs, and she comes up to him, her dress slipped to the side and revealing one shoulder. She is entirely at his disposal until the pain is vacant from his mind. She screams his surname in his ear and kisses him on the throat, the only thing that helps for even a passing while.

Tonight, he stares at the ceiling; for one reason or the next, he's not found sleep. He's lain stiffly in the same spot for hours. As Benjamin, he liked the mornings; as Sweeney, look what it's done to him. He shifts in bed, picks up his pocket-watch from the night-stand. It's half past two o'clock in the morning

Sweeney Todd sighs and gets up from bed, taking hardly any notice at the cold floor. He open the heavy bed-room door, which leads him to his empty shop. He sits on the floor in front of his chair, chin between two of his fingers. His eyes glint with the slowly crackling, contemplative fire in the pit of his stomach. He reaches out, lays his smooth hand on the surface of the chair's arm. When his finger-tips hit the screws on the side, he smiles slowly. He has a few minor adjustments to make.

**Part III **

'_Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came. Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave. No one was saved.'_

Mr Todd and his piercing, preying eyes follow Mrs Lovett across the bloodstained bake-house floor. On any other night, the floor would have been only thing to give them away. The rest would have been spotless; she sees to that every night but for this one. But the blood-stains never seem to wash out of the floor, no matter what she tries. Wood is one thing; brick is quite another matter.

She backs away from his for the first time she can think of, both hands out, a gesture. Oh, but she couldn't very well tell him to think it through, could she? Not _now_, not any-more. 'Come here, my love,' he whispers at her, his voice a strange sort of hiss. She backs herself up into the wall; he follows. He presses himself close against her, nose just hardly brushing hers, razor still in his left hand. His right he takes and sets in the crook of her waist, like he has so many times before, and Mrs Lovett finds her mouth is dry but for: 'Can we still be married?'

Mr Todd cannot tell her yes; nor, much surprise to him, can he tell her no. So, he does the only thing he still right knows how to do. He takes her in his arms and waltzes with her. His dear, practical little Mrs Lovett always did like to dance. (He never wanted her to be 'his,' but she just wouldn't hear other-wise.) They dance; they dance and they dance, as though this will be the last and final dance the world will see before it burns. (It's precisely _that _thought that gives him the plan for what the devil he's to do with her.)

Despite himself, still he rather likes having her in his arms for just the last moment, pretty brown eyes gleaming up at him like some sort of a demolished marionette. In her eyes (a bloody wonder), he can't do wrong no matter what he does, and it's in that he's found her down-fall. He clutches her hand in his, slick with sweat. Oh, for her, he will make a fitting death.

He shoves her from him in the middle of a turn, and of course she loses her balance, just as he'd intended. She falls into the open bake-oven, arms and tiny hands grabbing for him, but it's no use; he's one step out of her reach. In the death of such a strange woman, he fancies it quite odd that he never noticed the way that she too (with a sigh) grew warm in his hand, until it was too late to matter much at all any-more. None the less, he shuts the oven door while she screams, rinsing his hands for evermore of Mrs Lovett.

He's knelt on the floor, his beautiful, dear, and dead Lucy's head in his lap, when he hears young Tobias behind him, picking up the razor that clattered on the floor. Funny: he'd never imagined it would be the boy who'd be his saviour in the end. 'You shouldn't, you know,' says Toby, hand on Mr Todd's shoulder. 'You shouldn't harm no-body.'

It's the voice that makes Mr Todd turn his head. Not angry or rage-full, as he'd imagined, but rather queerly benevolent. That woman in the oven often referred to the boy as one of her angels, and Mr Todd never gave it a second thought until just now. He lets go of Lucy's head (as he never has), and switches his grateful eyes up to the boy above him. He turns down his shirt-collars, making way for a job well-done.

Toby Ragg drags the blade across Mr Todd's throat, and the razor sleeps at last.


End file.
